March 4, 2012

Oh My Zsh, for PowerShell

If you listen to The Change Log long enough, you’ll hear a lot of chatter about Vim. It’s quite a handy editor and one that I’ve used a good bit in spite of my long term affair with Scite. On some systems you don’t even know you’re using Vim unless you accidently invoke some code which is colorized using Vim syntax highlighting. There is a bit of a friendly competition between Vim adherents and Textmate. For the price alone, I come down on the Vimmer side. It has some features you can’t beat in a GUI editor much less a command line utility.

While looking for a way to use Vim on Windows 7, I remembered another very old episode of The ChangeLog which highlighted a shell known as Zsh which rounds out the feature set for a great development environment both of which are unavailable on Windows where I spend way too much of my time. Total sigh. What gave it the most useful features is the repository of add-on features for Zsh hosted on Github.

Then I stumbled over a command line shell that fits the bill, and perhaps then some, PowerShell. I had thought PowerShell was simply another command interpreter built to run inside a command shell. Boy was I wrong. A little digging and some playing around has revealed that it is much more than that. It rivals even BASH.

Half a problem solved, I’m still searching for a way to use all the Vim features inside a PowerShell window. In the mean time, even though late to the party, I’m enjoying PowerShell features while I edit files with Scite. Anyone for Oh, My PowerShell?